hen
Colin Powells former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson publicly decried
the Bush administrations bungling of U.S. foreign policy, the focus of
the press coverage was on Wilkersons depiction of a cabal headed by
Vice President Dick Cheney that had hijacked the decision-making
process.

Largely overlooked were Wilkersons frank
admissions about the importance of oil in justifying a long-term U.S.
military intervention in Iraq. The other thing that no one ever likes
to talk about is SUVs and oil and consumption, the retired Army colonel
said in a speech on Oct. 19.

While bemoaning the administrations incompetence in
implementing the war strategy, Wilkerson said the U.S. government now had no
choice but to succeed in Iraq or face the necessity of conquering the Middle
East within the next 10 years to ensure access to the regions oil supplies.

We had a discussion in (the State Departments Office of)
Policy Planning about actually mounting an operation to take the oilfields of
the Middle East, internationalize them, put them under some sort of U.N.
trusteeship and administer the revenues and the oil accordingly, Wilkerson
said. Thats how serious we thought about it.

The centrality of Iraqs oil in Wilkersons blunt comments
contrasted with three years of assurances from the Bush administration that the
war had almost nothing to do with oil.

When critics have called the Iraq War a case of blood for
oil, George W. Bushs defenders have dismissed them as conspiracy theorists.
The Bush defenders insisted the president went to war out of concern about
Iraqs weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Husseins links to al-Qaeda,
neither of which turned out to be true. Later, Bush cited humanitarian concerns
and the desire to spread democracy.

Always left out of the administrations war equation  or
referenced only obliquely  was the fact that Iraq sits atop one of the worlds
largest known oil reserves at a time when international competition is
intensifying to secure reliable oil supplies.

ONeills Revelations

But Wilkerson is not the first senior Bush administration
official to cite the importance of oil in the U.S. calculus toward Iraq. Former
Treasury Secretary Paul ONeill made similar assertions in 2004.

ONeill, who was fired in late 2002 after disagreeing with
Bush on tax cuts and Iraq, told author Ron Suskind that Bushs first National
Security Council meeting just days into his presidency included a discussion of
invading Iraq. ONeill said even at that early date, the message from Bush was
find a way to do this.

Oil and Iraq were soon mixing in the administrations
thinking about energy and politics.

On Feb. 3, 2001  only two weeks after Bush took office 
an NSC document instructed NSC officials to cooperate with Cheneys Energy Task
Force because it was melding two previously unrelated areas of policy: the
review of operational policies towards rogue states and actions regarding the
capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.

Before this disclosure, which appeared in The New Yorker
three years later, it was believed that Cheneys secretive task force was
focusing on ways to reduce environmental regulations and fend off the Kyoto
protocol on global warming.

But the NSC document suggested that the Bush administration
from its first days recognized the linkage between ousting unreliable leaders
like Saddam Hussein and securing oil reserves for future U.S. consumption. In
other words, the Cheney task force appears to have had a military component to
capture oil fields in rogue states. [For more on the NSC document, see The
New Yorker, Feb. 16, 2004.]

After al-Qaedas Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush had
the political opening he needed to turn his designs on Iraq into reality. Though
there was no credible evidence connecting Hussein to al-Qaeda and Sept. 11, Bush
and Cheney made the linkage anyway.

Active preparations for war with Iraq were soon underway.
Behind the scenes, ONeill said he watched as the administration refined its
plans for how to divvy up Iraqs oil reserves after the invasion.

Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence
Agency, (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfelds intelligence arm, mapping Iraqs
oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested
in leveraging the precious asset, Suskind wrote in The Price of Loyalty.

Beyond giving U.S. firms access to Iraqs oil, the Bush
administration recognized how the oil could help induce both allies and rivals
to back broader U.S. policies.

One document, headed Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield
Contracts, lists companies from 30 countries  including France, Germany,
Russia and the United Kingdom  their specialties, bidding histories, and in
some cases their particular areas of interest, Suskind wrote in recounting
ONeills observations.

An attached document maps Iraq with markings for
supergiant oilfield, other oilfield, and earmarked for production sharing,
while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine
blocks to designate areas for future exploration.

The desire to dissuade countries from engaging in
asymmetrical challenges to the United States matched with plans for how the
worlds second largest oil reserve might be divided among the worlds
contractors made for an irresistible combination, ONeill later said.

In pronouncements to the American people, however, Bush and
other administration officials denied that oil was a reason for the Iraq
invasion. Instead they stressed the danger posed by Iraqs supposed WMD, then
the humanitarian interest in removing Hussein, then encouraging democracy to
flourish in the region, and finally preventing the spread of Islamic extremism.

Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who was among the
career military officers pulled into the war planning, said she and her fellow
officers were troubled by how the American people were manipulated.

Many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and liberals
alike, felt that this (Iraq) agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had never
been openly presented to the American people, she wrote. Instead, the public
story line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take
Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false
pretenses. [See Salon.coms The
New Pentagon Papers.]

Wilkersons Critique

By contrast, Wilkerson openly acknowledged the oil factor
both in explaining the U.S. invasion and in justifying the need to remain in
Iraq to ensure that any new government is not hostile to American interests.

Despite his earlier doubts about the wisdom of invading,
the former chief of staff to Secretary of State Powell said the Middle Easts
oil reserves makes withdrawal from Iraq more dangerous than leaving Vietnam
three decades ago.

We cant leave Iraq; we simply cant, Wilkerson said in
his Oct. 19 speech to the New America Foundation in Washington.

Im not evaluating the decision to go to war. Thats a
different matter. But were there, weve done it, and we cannot leave. I would
submit to you that if we leave precipitously or we leave in a way that doesnt
leave something there we can trust, if we do that, we will mobilize the nation,
put five million men and women under arms and go back and take the Middle East
within a decade. Thats what well have to do.

Wilkerson made clear that what made Iraq such a strategic
concern was the oil.

We consume 60 percent of the worlds resources, he said.
We have an economy and we have a society that is built on the consumption of
those resources. We better get fast at work changing the foundation  and I
dont see us fast at work on that, by the way, another failure of this
administration, in my mind  or we better be ready to take those assets (in the
Middle East).

If you want those resources and you want (Middle Eastern)
governments that arent inimical to your interests with regard to those
resources, then you better pay attention to the area and you better not leave it
in a mess.

So, it appears those Iraq blood-for-oil accusations were
right all along, at least in identifying one of the real reasons for invading
Iraq. The present danger, however, is that U.S. policy-makers have no better
solution to the quagmire in Iraq than continuing indefinitely to barter more
blood for a continued supply of oil.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at
Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine,
the Press & 'Project Truth.'